Former U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador Peter Romero must return more than $700,000 that convicted Ponzi schemer R. Allen Stanford paid him during his eight years as an international advisor, the Fifth Circuit ruled.

A three-judge panel rejected the former dignitary’s argument that the court-appointed receiver for Stanford’s companies did not timely file his February 2011 complaint.

Stanford – who turns 66 next week – is serving a 110-year prison sentence after a federal jury in Houston, Texas, convicted him in 2012 of running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme premised on the sale of phony certificates of deposit.

In 2011, receiver Ralph Janvey went after Romero, one of several political figures recruited to lend credibility to Stanford’s fraudulent operations. Romero’s case was the first to go to trial.

Romero, appointed to the ambassadorship by Bill Clinton, retired from the U.S. Department of State in 2001…………………..

The law firms claim the court lacks jurisdiction since most of the investors were foreign and because the firms were stateless for legal purposes, and say the Supreme Court’s March 7 holding in ConAgra Foods et al. v. Americold Logistics et……..

Two big New York law firms that represented the now-imprisoned financier Allen Stanford persuaded a federal appeals court on Thursday to throw out a lawsuit claiming that they helped conceal his $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.

Reversing a lower court ruling, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said Chadbourne & Parke and Proskauer Rose were immune from liability for losses that 18,000 former Stanford investors blamed in part on Thomas Sjoblom, a lawyer who had represented the financier and worked at both firms…………………………..